Caltrops - Laurence Fishburne's Dance Dance Revolution





	[quote name="Gutsby"][quote name="laudablepuss"]It can give your life meaning, but what meaning? It's like those movies Fabio hates where one character is a genius because other characters proclaim that he is. Do we see him being a genius? We probably see him being a jackass. Why this isn't a problem for many movie-goers is a mystery, and why it's not a problem for many Christians etc. is also a mystery.[/quote] These are the right questions to begin asking. Of course, you've got it wrong - but at least you're treating it as an aesthetic matter instead of simply an irrational compulsion. What meaning can it give life? Well, it can orient you in the world. And a world in which your schema are flexible enough to be reconfigured but orderly enough not to bind you is a navigable world. And if you perceive the world as navigable, you can master living in it, despite the inherent tragedy of being limited in so many ways. Again, consider the people who created these religions - they weren't scientists. What they wanted to offer was a representation of the world that made it bearable - even one that allowed human societies to flourish. This isn't a matter of an end-point, despite the dramatizations of heaven and hell. Hell is real - it is what you experience when you can't orient yourself, when everything new scares and disgusts you, and everything old is boring and without challenge. It is often how depressed people experience the world. Heaven is real too - it is when you are so engaged with what you are doing and how you are acting that you appear to lose consciousness. Time seems to stop existing because you are doing something that challenges you perfectly, and you figuratively balance effortlessly between chaos and order. So you'll probably question why we need religion for this. Of course, we don't strictly <i>need</i> it like we need sustenance or human interaction. But religious thought deals with these things, and it often does so very lucidly. You see the same conflicts reenacted in religion and myth all over the place, across entirely seperate societies. [quote name="laudablepuss"] In any event, the people who aren't suspending all reason and lying to themselves about a personal god giving a shit about them are probably lying to themselves about their odds of beating the stock market or their skill at their job or something else. Including me, of course. We don't need modern research to know this about ourselves, but the research is fairly remarkable. I had been examining <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Believing-Brain-Conspiracies---How-Construct-Reinforce/dp/0805091254/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1317186259&sr=1-1">The Believing Brain</a> before I lost interest . . . for some reason the author rubs me the wrong way occasionally. [quote]it offers a story of our role in the world that has been refined through a centuries-long process of destillation. All of which were conceived to make it clearer to us what stories lead us to have fruitful lives that embody the flexibility required to deal with an attack on our representations of the world.[/quote] I have read lots of illuminating stories that were totally devoid of religious overtones. And I'm aware that I'm a product of our shared civilization. :/[/quote] "Suspending all reason"... like I said above, the religious ordering of the world is supposed to inform beneficial patterns of behaviour. Simply thinking you'll win the lottery or at the stock market is exactly the opposite. And if you want to read a book on the topic I recommend starting out with Scott Atran's "In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion". [/quote]